Monday, March 31, 2008

Money, money, money

I am NOT stuttering on the title. It is just a recurring thought! I am spending much time and money on stuttering, but have exactly zero revenue: money-wise that it. I also have hidden costs of loss of opportunity, because I am spending my intellectual energy at age 35 (where you are apparently most productive?) on an area where I do not have a career. I am neither a speech therapist/pathologist nor a scientist working on stuttering. Instead I could be spending my time on more "productive" work and earn more money as a consultant. Of course, I get a lot emotional revenue (also from your posted comments and emails), because I am driven to understand what stuttering is about, and what helps most. And 1000 weekly readers is a great but unhelpful stimulation of my ego... ;-)My goal is to make my efforts a zero-cost affair, but I am not quite sure how I can extract money from you, my readers, to cover costs. :-) Surely, no-one will pay to read me. My only chance might be to ask the few wealthy or charitable for donations but I am not sure how I should do this. My best bet is probably advertising. But, I have chosen not to advertise on my blog via goggle AdSense because most adverts are really fake promises of cures and I kind of find it difficult to rail against them and at the same time to get revenue from them! I might change my mind, and do it but only for a few selected one. I can certainly make the case that I have over 1000 unique readers per week and I am high on google search. So there is good exposure for the advert. This strategy is already working well for getting free books and reduced conference fees.